Your community is already alive to the influences surrounding it: businesses, events, organizations, seasonal traditions, and relevant news. You don’t have to write a new story from scratch; you just need to discover where you fit into the existing storyline. Generosity, creativity, and a genuine desire to contribute to community well-being are what it takes to become a visible player in local life.

‘Barnacle SEO’ was a term first popularized by Will Scott in 2011 to describe the process of attaching your business to existing high-ranking entities (like major directories) and then promoting them as a means of dominating search engine results for desired terms.

Today, we’re going to take that novel concept in a different direction, with the goal of increasing brand awareness for single, multi-location, and enterprise local businesses by latching onto existing influences in any given community.

Independently owned businesses hit roadblocks when they fear they have nothing real to say. Multi-location businesses fret over meaningful differentiation of one location from another. Large enterprises struggle with fostering local authenticity because the distance between the CEO and the clerk behind the checkout counter is sometimes too great, and brand-wide initiatives may result in generic, rather than truly local, messaging.

How to overcome these challenges? The solution lies in realizing that almost any given community is already writing your local story; you just have to discover how to latch onto it.

A large part of your blog posts, social outreach, and even paid advertising can be based on the fact that there are local, national, and global influences already firmly established in the minds of your consumers, almost every day of the year. Whether it’s the small-town 4th of July BBQ or the big-city Earth Day celebration, there are events, holidays, weather patterns, long-standing customs, and emerging news items of which your customers are already aware. Your barnacle local awareness marketing simply involves tying your business into pre-existing conditions, proving that you, too, are aware.

For Example:

1) Almost every local Chamber of Commerce website has an events calendar which will detail most significant community happenings. You can also use sites like Eventbrite for further inspiration. And, indeed, there are paid opportunity-finding services like ZipSprout that can do the work for you and hook you up with with relevant sponsorship matches. Remember, you’re looking for well-known happenings that are already part of your customers’ consciousness — events that they are seeing advertised around town, promoted on the web, local TV, and radio.

On the national/global side, major news sites will be your best bet. Some events (like international summits or sports championships) are publicized well in advance. Others will require-up-to the minute awareness of items in the ‘15 minutes news cycle’ that could impact your customers in some relevant way.

Gather links as you do your research and enter them in the spreadsheet.

Here are two real world examples of how other businesses utlized this approach:

Here’s an inspiring story about a NYC-based organization called New Women New Yorkers which helps immigrant women gain access to resources that will make their lives safer, more profitable, and more interesting in their new country. A local Lebanese restaurant called Manousheh answered the organization’s call for sponsorships and donations for an event, and was thanked on an events page and mentioned on events sites like this one. To close the barnacle loop, all the restaurant needs to do is start a page on their own site mentioning that they support this organization and that they participated in an event. It would be nice, too, if the organization would make sponsor logos link to their websites. Everybody is off to a good start here and just needs to go one step further.

When Twitter purchased Periscope in 2015, they were hoping for it grow in popularity and it has.

Users can be fickle when it comes to new networks; for them to latch on there needs to be a sufficient individuality to the service. Luckily this little app has oodles of personality.

Periscope lets you broadcast live streams to your followers all around the globe who can join, comment and (if they really like what you’re doing) send pretty little fluttering hearts up the side of the screen. Your network is built like this - users discover your stream by exploring pins on a map, they watch and like what they see, they follow you, and from then on are sent notifications whenever you are streaming. For business users this means the more followers you have, the bigger the benefit for your brand (and the more pretty little fluttering hearts on the side of your screen).

Twitter is normally very reliable with its acquisitions, having bought Vine before it was even launched, and Periscope is an ideal candidate to join their network of social networks. Ideally if you are splashing out nine figures on something you want to be fairly certain that it is going to take off. A lot of social networks can be curtailed either into the category of ‘for business’ or of ‘for pleasure’, with only the best ones successfully covering both. What we love about Periscope is that it does just that. It can equally be used as a tool for watching a guy on his gap year bungee jumping off of an elephant (while mourning your comparatively boring life), as it can be used to get involved with live Q&A sessions with professionals from a well respected brand in your industry.

Periscope is a great little tool for building your brand - and with the app being relatively in its infancy, there couldn’t be a better time to get involved. Here’s how you can do just that.

Behind the Scenes Footage

With Periscope the sky is the limit - one moment you’re watching a guy doing his shopping in Walmart, the next a traveller showing you around her yacht, the next a bloke in a Giraffe costume dancing around his office (yes, that was us.) People love being exposed to a place they might otherwise never see, and that includes work space. If you’re developing a new product, have a new office or a really interesting work site people want to see. Just showing them around and explaining what you’re doing is a great way to build recognition of your brand.

Office Celebrations

Whether it's someone’s birthday or the Anniversary of your company launch, everybody loves a party. If your colleagues have got the afternoon off for tea, cake and cocktails, invite your customers to get involved too. On Social Media day, we at Giraffe had a Periscope’d garden party and viewers were commenting about how much good fun we looked, and that they would love to work with us. Office celebrations get your audience viewing you as real people who love having fun which can work wonders for brand image and identity.

Professional Q&A Sessions

Holding live Q&A sessions is a great way to concrete your brand as an industry leader. Get people to submit their questions to you while you are broadcasting. Not only does it encourage trust in your service, it’s a great way to showcase that you are comfortable under the spotlight.

Focus Groups

Building a new product or service? Get your audience involved! On Periscope you can use Focus Groups to get people to vote on different decisions in the during the development process. Not only is it a great way to conduct on the spot market research, it will make your customers feel valued and part of creating something.

As with any new social marketing effort, there is likely to be a period of trial and error, but if you keep at it there is certainly untapped marketing potential for Periscope. If you’re uncertain, just download the app and see what others are using it for. Before long your business could be relishing in more web traffic, increased brand awareness and many, many pretty little fluttering hearts on the side of your screen.

The exciting features of Facebook Instant Articles include allowing publishers to optimize their content for instant access.

In the past, after clicking on an article link in the Facebook app, users would have to wait until the site was loaded before gaining access to the content.

In addition, Facebook is providing publishers with full control over the look of their stories as well as the ability to bring in their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue.

How does it work for non-mobile Facebook users?

Desktop users will still be taken to the website featured in the article when they click on the link provided.

For mobile users sharing Facebook Instant Articles, those clicking on a shared link will be taken direct to the Instant Article.

What about referral traffic?

Mobile users are not counted as referral traffic from Facebook because they do not visit the website. Companies need to utilize tools such as Google Analytics to track traffic coming from Facebook Instant Articles. This will help retain overall visitor counts as well.

What apps, tools or devices do I need to use Facebook Instant Articles?

The prerequisites necessary include the following:

- A Facebook page
- The Facebook Pages App -which allows the user to preview the Instant Articles on a mobile device.
- An RSS feed that displays the full content of articles for automated publishing.
- An official plugin that is still in development, which allows for Facebook Instant Articles markup on your blog or website. You can also use the PageFrog plugin.
- A minimum of 50 articles to submit to Facebook for approval.

While it can be a bit of an effort to prepare for launching Facebook Instant Articles, it may be well worth it

if you add another source of traffic to your website for marketing your product or services.

In today's mobile and internet economy, you can never have enough eyes on the page you wish the public to see!

For more information about Facebook Instant Articles, please email me for a consultation at snefzgerpr@gmail.com.

Video marketing is gaining popularity from marketers thanks to social integration and investments by Internet giants. It is gaining a vital place in the marketing plans of all major companies to connect and engage with consumers in order to convert them into paying customers.

Still don't believe the hype? Here are some statistics to prove the point. According to Syndacast, 74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video. Not only that, studies show that using the word "Video" in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 19 percent, click-through rates by 65 percent and reduce un-subscribers by 26 percent. According to Twitter, videos and photos get the most retweets.

Read on to understand why this is now the reality.

Facebook's boosted its video strategy
Last year, Facebook announced that its video viewership doubled from 4 billion views per day to 8 billion views per day in a period of seven months. This staggering growth of video viewership highlights the immense potential of videos for bringing in advertising dollars, keeping viewers engaged and increasing viewership. Facebook launched its picture in picture viewing last year, which lets users watch video while browsing the news feed. Facebook is also testing a dedicated video feed stream to let viewers only watch videos shared by their network. Facebook is pushing the envelope to create more video infrastructure, and so are marketers to take advantage of its potential.

SEO benefits
Videos have a direct impact on search results. It is common knowledge that rich media, which includes videos, is favored by search engine algorithms. To top it up, the fact that Google owns YouTube also plays a role in video's increased popularity. Google has been constantly adjusting its algorithm to give its users a meaningful experience while searching. To satisfy user intent, they show a variety of results, and not just exact keyword matches. As a result, search results now prominently feature videos among top results.

Easy on the eye, and the brain
There's no shortage of content out there in the digital world. People are overloaded with information that they cannot process. Videos are a breath of fresh air in a world dying with information overload. It is easier for the brain to process visual content amidst a sea of text. Creating an impact through videos is therefore that much easier.

Viral potential
Users are more likely to share and re-share video than other forms of content. It is a great tool for businesses and professionals to showcase their vision, expertise, products, services, company news and announcements for maximum outreach.

Kills many birds with one stone
Whichever stage of the customer funnel you are targeting, videos can help. The objectives of educating, entertaining, inspiring or increasing brand awareness can all be achieved through videos. More and more people today educate themselves through product reviews and blog updates before making a purchase decision. Animoto's research says that 96 percent of consumers find videos helpful when they are making purchase decisions online. Moreover, 58 percent of them consider companies that produce videos to be more trustworthy.

Videos drive traffic and engagement, they convey information better than other types of content and promote trust in the brand and its products. Little wonder then, that video is becoming a critical component of every company's marketing mix.

Go ahead, offer the newsletter signup on your blog page. Its more productive if you already have an audience, for example followers of your blog. Additionally, the content must be outstanding and consistently so. By offering the newsletter sign up on your blog page, readers will want to know what they are receiving.

That all depends on you. Maybe you will be sending out blogposts directly to peoples’ inboxes – or even better you have some free and additional stuff you can send via the newsletter, something people can not get anywhere else.

2) Offer a free gift for signup

Many use this option: They offer something like a white paper, a cheat sheet or a case study or a free video. To get it people need to sign up for the email list. The better your offer is, the more people will actually sign up.

Be aware that your offer needs to be targeted at your audience. If your offer does not match the interests of your target group, the audience (aka subscribers) won't sign up.

A free gift doesn’t always need to create a lot of work for you – many successful email marketers advise not putting more than two hours into this effort.

3) Signups for early access and shares for something of value

This approach works for offerings of real value. For example:

Recently Canva (the tool for creating great graphics, if you do not know it yet, please check it out) announced that “Canva for Work” is coming and asked people to signup for early access. I admit I am a fan of Canva and use it a lot. So even though I have no clue what “Canva for Work” is going to offer me, I signed up. Canva did even more, they offered me 2 months of “Canva for work” for free, if I got a couple of other people to sign up via my own personal campaign link. Since I absolutely believe Canva for work is going to be great, I shared it with my network and got Canva even more signups and 2 months of Canva for work for myself.

So the basic idea is: Get people to signup for something they are likely to want and get them to share this by offering them early access or even offer them a special price or something for free.

4) Converting a Social audience to a newsletter list

These tactics all work together nicely, if you integrate thoughtfully. Using social channels to drive traffic to your blog and then to get people to sign up for your newsletter is an effective approach. You can also offer a free gift to your social audience. You can do that with tweets, Facebook updates, Twitter direct messages or even via Facebook ads. In the end your goal is to get as many (targeted) people as possible to be aware of your free offer and to want your free offer enough to be willing to give you their email address in return.

Any kind of audience you already have, can serve as a push channel for building your email marketing. If you are a famous speaker. Collect email addresses at your speaking events. If you are a guest blogger, add your free offer in your author bio etc.

If you already have an audience, building an email list is much easier

Having an existing audience is very helpful for building your email list. Everything you do, whether you are a writer, an artist, a chef a product marketer, should be geared toward building a list. Lists can be advantageous for many things, not just email marketing.

Promoting a video hangout on Google+ is a great way to use your list, Facebook advertising another way, product promotion via the internet whether your blog, or another social channel is a must. Everything is online these days.

The above ideas are just starting points – to successfully build a huge email list you should combine these ideas and add your own ideas to the mix. For instance: On your blog you could offer additional content exclusive to email subscribers in addition to informing them about your new content. You could also add in a whitepaper that you could send directly after signup. You could also provide many different signup forms with different freebies – one could be a six day email course, another one would be a cheat sheet, etc. Different people want or need different things – so you can make individual offers to different target group.

Digital marketing and advertising technology is now the norm for online efforts to build a brand. That is precisely why I expanded my public relations business to become an internet marketing company. Online visibility IS the norm. Everyone is online, and on their mobile apps. If you are building a brand you better be online.

According to a recent study, of 200 UK media agencies, the overall majority (86%) say they are changing the way they do business to reflect the influence of the technology of online ads, that means changing the roles of staff, their expertise and the relationships that go along with all of that information.

The report, "Welcome to the Era of Mad Tech", suggests that 80% of agencies say that buyers are evolving more into becoming tech strategists and traders whilst planners are transitioning into the role of data analyst according to 88% of respondents. 83% meanwhile say that both buyers and planners’ roles are evolving into that of account managers and creative consultants.

Lots of companies are consulting with clients but many have chosen to actually evolve by offering mobile and social offerings in the past year.

For example, 69% of those surveyed described themselves as tech savvy whilst 60% said that they had expanded their mobile and social offerings in the past year – as opposed to 39% who chose to adopt a more consultative approach.

The report also showed that most agencies were working closely with their ad tech partners – with 90% saying that they had a close relationship with them. More than half (56%) said that they had benefited from productive collaborations whilst 46% said that ad tech was allowing their agency to provide clients with effective technology-based solutions at more competitive rates.

Agencies face challenges which is evident in the numbers of response from this report: 40% of agencies said that they found it hard to develop profitable models around their ad tech partnerships whilst 47% said that ad tech wasn’t as easy to monetise as traditional media.

Whatever you choose, make sure you are online in various capacities, in social media ads, or Google ads.

You might be surprised to learn that those marketing professionals on the front lines

say that email marketing is the most effective digital tool for gaining response and leads from target audiences.

The July 2015 Survey of 300 global marketing professionals reported that 48% of respondents say that email marketing was the most effective tactic for lead generation in the B to B environment. Followed by 44% saying that website and landing pages are the most effective, a close third also say that content marketing is the best way to lure customers with 43% of the vote. SEO or Search engine optimization came in fourth with 37 percent of the respondents votes.

What does that mean for marketers and those who rely on digital content marketing to obtain leads from a target audience? Marketers responded by saying that while email marketing is the most effective, content marketing is the most difficult digital tactic in obtaining leads and prospects through online platforms.

Ok, you've finally launched your first authored piece of writing, whether it's a blog, a book, or a white paper.

You feel that you have accomplished a great deal of work, but you are unsure of how to reach your audience.

And there is an audience for each message, do not concern yourself with the wisdom of that notion.

So what do you do next?

Lets discuss the four tips to start gaining visibility for your authorship.

1) Know Your Audience! In order to know your audience, you must be aware of the message you are conveying on a consistent basis. Who do you wish to reach and who does your message speak to?

If you can answer these questions, then you know your audience. Great! If you don't know the answer, then you need to drill down into the meaning of your writing and make the message more clear for your audience.

2) Go to Your Audience. Now that we've determined who your audience is, where are they reading online?

For example, if you are publishing a blog that contains poetry, where are the poetry lovers? Research forums,

Wordpress blogs, chat rooms, social media linkage on Twitter, Facebook, and Communities in Google+, find associations of people who love poetry throughout the World Wide Web. Then, share the link to your blog with a brief descriptive keyword phrase on these platforms and do so consistently. When you have a like or a follow, definitely thank your audience.

3) Be Consistent. Now that you've categorized your audience, figured out where they hangout online and begun interacting and sharing your authorship, you must be consistent in how you share your writing. If you publish a blog each week, do it on the same day of the week. If you have published a book, share something about that book weekly in the same places, on the same platforms to entice your readers to come back for more.

4) Stay Active. Now that you know your audience, where they hangout online and what they like about your writing, stay involved in the online platforms that you have established a presence within. The key to online visibility is posting fresh content, consistently and often. That's it! Oh yes and don't forget to keep interacting with your audience. Good Luck and please comment if you have questions.

You can email me at susan@snefzgerpr.com or find me on social media, see links on the home page.

Mobile is more than "a channel." Mobile devices are the new front doors for most brands and retailers.

Agencies have proven themselves adept at understanding new communications platforms and channels and finding the best, most relevant ways for brands and retailers to engage with their consumers.

A platform provider that helps marketers acquire mobile users, reports that the changes from the leading agencies in the last 18 months have been dramatic.

Data is king right? Specifically, what sophisticated agencies are using to optimize their mobile marketing campaigns in 2015 is multichannel, multidevice data which provides actionable insights to better optimize marketing, according to metrics like lifetime customer value. We've moved beyond third-party data to better CTR or conversion rates on single campaigns toward holistic marketing data derived from a range of internal and external first-party data sources.

Though the data is owned by marketers (and in some cases publishers), brands understand the importance of data for their agency partners, and are increasingly sharing this data with agencies.

And the leading agencies are staffing their teams accordingly with data and business analysts, data scientists and mathematicians who are bringing with them relevant skill sets to build the necessary processes for gleaning the best and most relevant insights for the data on a continuous and near real-time basis.

How important is data to the future of agencies? The great number of media account reviews announced in 2015, including Coca-Cola, P&G, Unilever, General Mills, L'Oréal, Visa and more, has been widely attributed to the search for better applications of data and analytics.

Startups come and go, and some make it big, but agencies (like JWT, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year) have survived and grown even with the "disruptions" of radio, TV, the internet and now mobile. Through an intelligent integration of the various sources of first-party marketer, publisher and tech-vendor data, agencies will continue to survive and thrive in this new media landscape.

Whether you manage your social media marketing or someone else does, its a challenge to keep up with what works well for your brand. Here are six tips to keep it simple.

1. ABT Always Be Testing

Analytics are a gold mine of information. Paying attention to analytics will help you learn when your target audience is online, what posts are getting the most attention, and what topics resonate with your community. Then tailor your content to fit into what your audience and community considers useful and helpful, which results in becoming a resource.

2. Use Value Added Content

Grow your community by utilizing value added content that they will be able use as a reference. They will come back for more information on a regular basis if you show that you do care for their needs and interests.

3. Focus on the Consumer

When people feel that they're important to you, they pay more attention to you. Thank people for posts or sharing your posts, ask questions that help you get to know people better. And when you're asked a question, answer honestly, as YOU. We all know that there are faces behind each brand, let your personality come out from behind the brand as well.

4. Do More Than Just Listen

Active social listening is one of the most important items in any social media marketing plan - but you have to do more than simply listen and place people into little persona boxes. You have to have open two-way, mutually beneficial conversations - that is the only way to truly get to know people, find out what’s important to them and find ways in which you can help to make their lives better. We already know you’ve got the best product/brand/service in the world, how can you let your communities know that as well, without directly telling them?

5. Add Visuals

Look at your timeline and take some time to scroll through. What catches your eye? The miles and miles of text, or a picture or video that pops out? I’m willing to put my money on the visuals. Use one-of-a-kind photos (best if you take them yourself) that represent you or your brand and intersperse them with your text updates.

6. Be Consistent

Keep your core values top of mind through all content mediums and platforms. Each time someone has a touch point with you or your brand, they should be able to recognize it as the same from another medium, without thought. Consistency also leads to reliability and reliability leads to trust. And trustworthy people and brands always stand out.

When you're able to put all or some of these items together, you can better create a top-notch user experience for your communities, consumers and potential consumers. People will begin to see you as helpful, responsive, someone who cares about their needs. When you speak to people as they like to be spoken to you will have no problem with any other 'noise' on social media.

For more info on these other social media tips and content marketing questions please email me at susan@snefzgerpr.com.